the voices that call (and the songs they sing)
by RoboticRainboots
Summary: [CoS] In the past two months, Alphonse's life has been turned completely upside down. He wakes up from the failed Human Transmutation and is told his brother is dead. But slowly, Al starts to realize things don't add up as they should, that his memories don't match the reality he is living in. And there's the voices that call to him every night from the basement.


**A/N: I've never written a story as spontaneous as this. Even the others I've written recently that I consider "spontaneous" don't hold a candle to this one. I woke up one morning at five and typed this entire thing out in an hour without knowing where I was going in the slightest.**

 **I wanted to try a couple of things out with style and prose, and this is the result of that. I like to think it's some kind of AU, where after the events of the 2003 anime everyone tells Alphonse that Edward is dead and pretends that nothing has changed since Al woke up from the Human Transmutation, that his memory must be faulty and that Winry and Edward were always five years older than him. I'm not really sure haha, but I guess that's what happens when you write at 5 a.m., I figured I'd post it anyway since it was already written.**

There are voices in the hall. Al can hear them. They whisper to him, call out his name.

The first time he heard them, he thought he must have been making them up. There was no way they could have possibly been real, they must have been some sort of dream. It was such a faint sound, so quiet and so tired like long forgotten memories.

But after a month of hearing them, he knows they must be real. They're like a siren's song. Soft at first, but slowly they grow louder and louder until by the final hours of night they're practically screaming to him.

He can feel the voices too. They're just as much a physical manifestation as they are a vocal one. They echo inside of him like he's an empty chamber. They make homes in the spaces between his organs and float through his bloodstream like they're vital to his survival. They've sunk their hook into his little, fishy throat and they're reeling him in.

When he's finally had enough, Alphonse climbs slowly out of bed and stands there barefoot on the cold floor. He doesn't sleep in the same room he used to, it is too painful to sleep restless next to a perpetually empty bed and breathe in the lingers of his brother's scent.

Al passes their old bedroom as he walks, following where the calling voices lead. The door has been permanently shut, that chapter of their lives over and done with, but tonight the door rest open and moonlight spills out like a spell. He sees dust collecting on their old bookshelf, a red coat he doesn't remember in a wad where Brother used to sleep.

Al makes a move to shut the door as he passes it, but the call of the voices only intensifies, leaving him no time to close it up.

He keeps his feet light on the stairs as he goes down. He knows exactly where to stand on each step to avoid all the creaks and groans of the old house so he won't wake Winry or Granny up.

Again, he takes the stairs as they call him down into the basement.

 _ **Alphonse**_ , they whisper, _**Alphonse, Alphonse, Alphonse.**_

The voices are a chorus. They sound like several children crying out in unison, an urgent fear beneath their calm. But somewhere in that unholy choir, Al swears one of those voices belongs to his brother and it's crying out his name.

The Rockbells had turned their basement into a finished automail workshop years before he was born. With their esteemed reputation as the best automail mechanics in the east, they needed a place to work and the basement was the best option they had.

But not all of the basement was used as a workshop. About a quarter of the space had been separated and walled off as a storage closet. The closet was always kept locked tight, just like his and brother's old room, and Al only knows that the closet _is_ a closet because of the onetime Winry showed it to him when he was six.

Now he isn't even sure if _that_ memory is real.

Tonight, the closet door stands open.

The voices inside pour from it, reaching the crescendo of their song. _That's where they live,_ Al thinks, _the voices live in the closet_.

He wants to turn back now that he knows where they come from, but he can't. They've infected his ears, his brain, and got him too tightly wound around their millions little fingers.

The darkness of the basement closet reminds him of another basement he once knew. A basement that's now gone, their house destroyed by flames. He's told he was there to witness it.

It's funny how he doesn't remember that, the roaring fire and the burning wood; he doesn't even feel the ghost of it on his skin.

There's a lot of things he doesn't remember. The fire, the fact that everyone has grown up like weeds around him and left him behind, his brother's death. There's a black hole in his head that eats up all the light and whatever memories it can reach. It leaves him bare and broken.

They tell him it's trauma, Winry and Granny do, and he believes them because there's nothing else to believe. Trauma has made him forget, it's made him block out all the things he wishes were gone and as a result it leaves holes in his mind and fairytales to fill the gaps.

Trauma is why Winry wears her long hair twisted back in a style he doesn't remember. Trauma is why Granny's always gray hair looked somehow even whiter when he woke. Trauma is why he had to be told his brother is gone, lost in a disaster alchemic experiment, and Al is the only one left alive.

That, he does remember, despite what he lets Winry and Granny believe. He doesn't remember the actual transmutation itself, but he remembers everything leading up to it. Their planning, their studying, their preparations.

Their motivation to bring Mom back from the dead.

And it's like five years had passed between that sunrise and the last. He doesn't remember Winry being so much older than him, Brother too. He doesn't remember the Lieutenant who sometimes calls after him and chats with Winry on the phone when she thinks he cannot hear. He doesn't remember himself. He feels like a stranger has torn him completely apart and tried to stitch him back together without even knowing who he was before.

He's full of puzzle pieces in all the wrong places and no picture to look at to figure out how.

Something is amiss. Something he didn't make up due to trauma.

The voices come to an eerie halt when his foot slides over the barrier of the door. It shocks him like cold ice water being poured down his back. He's gone so long listening to voices that weren't really there that he's forgotten what silence sounds like.

His small fingers of ten-year-old hands grip the wall, searching blindly until he finds the light switch and flicks it on.

The lights are so blinding that Al almost calls out as he brings his hands up to cover his eyes. After seconds of standing there like that, clutching at his face almost as if he were crying, Al slowly brings his hands down and looks across the room.

The light is so bright that it almost makes the room look completely white and featureless. He can see the faint outline of cardboard boxes stacked against the walls, labeled with names of spare parts and tools.

 _What did he come here for again?_

The instant he thinks it, the voices start up again, as faint as they were the first time he heard them, and he remembers.

This time their song is different. The same words, _**Alphonse, Alphonse, Alphonse**_ , but their tune is sung differently.

Less desperate, more melancholic.

It's a lament for the living, a lullaby for the dead.

All of this feels so familiar. Standing here, staring into the white nothingness, it's like the first time he's felt something real since he woke up and found out his brother was dead.

The voices lead him forward still and he trips blindly through the light until he stands before the hearth of it all.

Their source is giant, stacked up on a makeshift stand and the top of it barely scrapes the ceiling. It's so very hard to look at it all at once, the light reflecting off its silver mirror surface, so Al takes it in in pieces.

His eyes start at its feet, polished silver like the rest of it. There are spikes on its feet, its knees, a vessel made for war. Its hands are large, big enough to grasp a human head in its palms and squeeze.

As Al's eyes travel its body, realization grows in him like a sickness. The serpent cross painted on its shoulder in deep red like blood, the pocket strapped around its left cuisse (how does he know that word?), the broad chest.

As he gazes up his stomach starts to sink, and as it sinks, he starts to remember.

He wasn't always five years younger than Brother and Winry like they told him, he was only a year like he said. He isn't ten, he's fourteen.

 _They've all been lying right too you and you stupidly believed them._

Still, that doesn't explain the utter familiarity he feels as his eyes trace the pristine curves of metal. Something about this suit of armor feels so bound to his very soul.

Finally, he brings his eyes up to its face, trying to meet its gauze but there's only empty black. He shies away when he tries to look at it, made small under its nonexistent glare. It isn't very nice looking, its face angry like a hulking monster and he's its prey. The voices that call won't stop. They're loudest when he stands here, emanating all around him and reverberating inside the empty, metal shell.

Whatever has happened to him, whatever lie he has been living, this suit of armor holds all the keys to revealing it.

Al takes a step back, almost tripping over his own feet, but catches himself just in time. The bright light paints a halo around the suit's helmet and Al closes his eyes. _Think,_ he urges himself, _there must be something here. Why would the voices call me to it if there wasn't?_

When he opens his eyes again and take it all in, he falls to his knees like a boy in prayer. The voices are screaming now, shirking and crying and his heart beats fast. This is it, this is it.

Memory floods into his small body like the sea, drowning him in pain and sorrow. He wants to scream at their while hot pain. They burn, his skin feels like it's on fire and images flash in his mind in rapid fire.

Amestrian blue military uniforms.

A man with red eyes and an x-shaped scar.

Nights without sleep. Years of them.

A woman who was more snake than human. His mother in the flesh, limbs moving like a river. A child with mismatched limbs.

An eight-point star surrounded in a circle and embellished with a serpentine swirl.

A silver suit of armor.

A boy in red with a long golden braid.

It hurts so badly to take everything at once. Al lies there, a mess on the floor, panting and clutching at his head. They lied to him, Brother isn't dead. Al saw him, he's alive. Somewhere out there he lives.

Al lets out a sob, gasping out the only word that comes to mind.

" _Brother."_


End file.
